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Barbara Messing

TripAdvisor’s Chief Marketing Officer Barbara Messing may speak for a brand that speaks to over 200 million unique users in 21 languages every month, but she’s spent 2013 charting a strategy to speak to even more. “We felt like there was still a bigger opportunity to tell the TripAdvisor story,” she said when announcing TripAdvisor’s first television advertising push this fall.

Ms. Messing has been at the company since February 2011, and before that spent nine years at Hotwire. She’s guided the brand voice as the company split from sister brand Expedia and forged a path of its own — one that’s seen both its stock and its user count rise. And she’s done it while building trust with users and hotels alike, no easy feat for a brand that has struggled with being perceived an enemy of properties.